No, whites do not face discrimination en masse today
A recent poll conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Harvard’s School of Public Health found that a majority of white Americans, 55 percent, feel there is discrimination against them in today’s world. Smaller percentages are able to pinpoint a specific example where they were personally discriminated against, for instance, when applying to jobs or being considered for promotions.
The idea of anti-white discrimination is not just untrue, it is spectacularly wrong. Whites are overrepresented in pretty much every area of life – government, media, academia, and the corporate world are all filled with white people. There are some professions where minorities have more representation, such as professional sports, but these are extreme and rare exceptions to the rule. It’s tempting to chalk the belief in white discrimination up to the grievance politics of political correctness in the last several decades, but this anti-white fear goes much deeper than that. This belief in anti-white discrimination runs deep in American history.
Emily Ekins, a research fellow and pollster at the Cato Institute, recently released an extensive report on the state of free speech and political expression. There are many telling things about the report: For one, about 58 percent of people feel that political correctness prevents them from expressing their beliefs. Along this same line, 73 percent of Republicans have felt the need to self-censor.
This fear on the part of conservatives is fed by a sense that conservative opinions, particularly those of straight, white men, are being marginalized on college campuses. It’s no secret that college campuses are overwhelmingly liberal, as roughly nine percent of faculty members identify as either conservative or very conservative. There have been some egregious cases of academic malfeasance at places like Middlebury College and University of California, Berkeley, among others. This doesn’t mean there is an actual bias against straight, white men, but given man’s propensity for tribalism, it can definitely feed the perception of one.